


packed in like feathers

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Series: more than luck [3]
Category: Batwoman (Comic), DCU (Comics)
Genre: F/F, Family Bonding, Fishing, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 07:44:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10157822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: “What do you think, kiddo?”“Mom!” Jasón exclaims as he reads the green printed on cream: I LOVE (it when) MY WIFE (lets me go fishing). “Does Mama like it?”“I laughed harder than she did,” Renee supplies.Part 3 of a series where Kate and Renee adopt a reincarnated Jason. Family fishing trip! Can be read independently of other parts.





	

**Author's Note:**

> title from the poem ["the fish"](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/fish-2) by elizabeth bishop.
> 
>  **warnings** for animal death, fishing-related gore, insect mentions, language, alcohol mention, classism.

“Jasón?”

Kate thinks that when Renee says their son’s name, she cups it close and kisses its forehead before she sends it away. It makes her heart cave in for the softness of it.

“Jasón,” Renee croons, stepping into his room. 

Neatly-trimmed collection of interests: a terrarium he devotedly maintains, glossy posters of cars, Merida bedspread.

A mussed black head pops up from the pile of princess comforters. “I’m awake!”

Folding her arms over her chest, Renee looks wry. “I know. I was only checking.”

He gives them a big grin in the early morning black of his room, a grin wide enough to show the tooth that used to be chipped, now with a seamless crown. 

He’d had his first dentist’s appointment right after they adopted him. Actually, they’re coming up on the one year anniversary of his adoption. 

They’ve got something small planned, her and Renee. She’s not sure whether he remembers the date. He certainly might, with his strange and sharp memory. 

Either way, she can’t think of anything more worthy of celebration.

 

Kate waits until socked feet hit the floor and race for the bathroom before she nudges Renee down the hall to the kitchen. 

“Can’t believe you woke me up at the ass-crack of dawn for this white people shit,” Renee grumbles, nose in her coffee mug.

Kate gives her a look.

“Butt-crack,” Renee amends. “...Crap.”

That wasn’t what she was getting her for, but it is true that they both should _probably_ be watching their language around Jasón. He curses like a sailor and isn’t in a hurry to clean up his vocabulary.

Understandable, considering where and how he used to live.

However, this morning, he’s not awake early to get on the move before trouble rattled through whatever bleak corner of Gotham he’d curled up in for the night. 

Something much more mundane, though Kate’s excited.

It’s the first Kane-Montoya family fishing trip, and Kate can’t wait.

 

Jasón joins them in fifteen minutes flat. That’s her son, Kate thinks proudly.

“Showered?” Renee asks without looking up.

“Yeah!” Jasón plops down in the chair next to her.

“Bag packed?” Kate looks towards his bedroom, where she can see the duffel bag in the corridor.

“Yeah!”

Standing to go grab it to stick with the others, she pauses so she can kiss the top of his wet head. Curious, she noses at his hair. It smells of green apples. “Out of shampoo?”

Sheepish, Jasón shrugs. “Mama said I could use hers.”

There it is: the separate lives of three solitary people slow-growing into a shared one. “Use hers for the trip. We’ll go shopping on our way back from the trip. If you’re not too tired.”

“I won’t be too tired,” he insists with confidence, and he really could be right.

With the hand not holding her coffee mug, Renee sticks two fingers up behind his head. “Energizer bunny.”

Jasón swats at her hand, rolling his eyes at the old joke. “But I’ve got unlimited* battery life.”

Kate groans and slumps forward in mock exhaustion, peeking up at them with one eye open.

Renee presses a _smeck_ of a kiss to his cheek that makes him wrinkle his nose (Kate imagines that was the intent). “When’s Jacob getting here?”

“He said oh five hundred hours. It’s ten til.”

Cue the coughing grumble of the beat-up minivan Dad borrows from the neighbors. Bolting upright, Kate grabs the cooler and one of the bags while Renee grabs another.

“Take a hat,” she insists to Jasón as he toes on his shoes, then feels ridiculous for it.

“I’ve never gotten sunburned.” Jasón squishes his cheeks together and nods to her glow-in-the-dark white. “ _You_ take a hat.”

Point taken. Kate pinches his cheek just a little--there’s a bit of something _to_ pinch these days. 

Before she can get to it, Jasón swipes Renee’s GCPD hat. It’s too big for him and bumps down around his teacup ears.

So Kate takes the one Dad bought her on their first father-daughter fishing trip after she got married. “What do you think, kiddo?”

“Mom!” Jasón exclaims as he reads the green printed on cream: I LOVE (it when) MY WIFE (lets me go fishing). “Does Mama like it?”

“I laughed harder than she did,” Renee supplies. She wraps an arm around Kate and gives her a kiss. And of course it’s with an ulterior agenda--takes one of the bags she’s carrying.

“You always do.” They play tug-of-war with the bag for a moment; Kate wins. 

“Not true. Remember on Wednesday, when I slipped on the roof of the hospital?”

“Yeah, but _that_ was funny.”

Renee huffs, clearly insulted, as she nudges Jasón out of the apartment and into the elevator.

 

“Got you something, Jasón.” Dad produces a fishing vest and holds it out to Jasón.

Jasón hesitates like he always does at first when given a gift. Kate helps it onto his little shoulders. “Thank you, J--” His usual rapid-fire speech stumbles. Kate realizes that he’s still not sure what to call him. “Thank you,” he finishes, embarrassed.

“Jacob’s fine,” Dad says, awkward but sympathetic. They’re all just figuring this out.

Renee slings the last of the bags in the back. Lifts a finger. “Shotgun.”

So Dad and Jasón end up in the back. Jasón starts off shy at first, but within ten minutes, he’s chattering. Kate thinks she hears the phrase _military-industrial complex_ and tunes them out.

Outside Gotham limits, Renee struggles with the radio stations. City slicker. Jasón too.

Sublime comes piping out, and Renee sits back, satisfied.

“Is that really appropriate?” Kate glares a little, eyes flicking from the road for a moment. 

“I love this song.” From Jasón in the back. Apparently enough to break his focus from the chess game--magnetic set they bought for Jasón at a museum shop after he hovered around it for five minutes, not asking--he and Dad have been engrossed in for the past hour.

Kate’s glare intensifies, but Renee smirks and she can’t help that it simmers down to room temperature after that.

_”Believe me when I say I’ve got something for his punk--”_

“Butt,” Jasón cuts off the vocals sternly.

Well. They’re...getting there.

 

Hat tipped over her face, knees spread wide, Renee snoozes in the boat.

Kate throws trail mix at her to little effect.

“Do they use _real_ flies for fly fishing?”

“Kate, haven’t you taught this boy anything of real world use?” 

She pelts an M&M at Renee’s nose, which crinkles. Other than that, Renee doesn’t twitch a muscle. Yawning, made tired by her wife’s stillness, Kate pillows her head on her chest. “Learn him good, Dad.”

“That’s horrible grammar.” Jasón’s peering down into the murky water, dimpled by the occasional water strider. “Those are also called _Jesus bugs,_ ” he tells her father.

“You like bugs?” She can hear the smile in his voice. “Kate didn’t. Her sister used to put them down the back of her shirt.”

“Beth,” Jasón says softly.

Kate swallows hard.

“Beth,” Dad agrees, heavy as the still afternoon. “What was your mother’s name, Jasón?”

She strains to hear anything. “Renee,” he breathes at last, decidedly. “Kate.”

 

With every wet flop of the fish in the bucket, Jasón winces.

“Want to see how to clean a fish?”

By how Jasón’s taking his time inching towards him, Kate doesn’t think it’s quite a _yes._

Dad slits open the white belly. Places viscera in his hands. Smudges of greasy yellow, ink-drops of black. Like fallen petals, the gills. Grisly.

“Apparently fish do eat real flies. You were right, son.” Cutting open the pallid stomach, he turns over an insect, half-slurry, in his fingers. When no ready reply comes, Dad prompts, “Kiddo?”

Rocked back on his heels, tiny face twisted tight, Jasón cups the crimson heart in his palms. “Fish have mothers. And sisters.” His thumb prods at a thick rill; Kate feels a little sick suddenly despite the fact that she's been doing this since she was younger than him. "And grandfathers." 

Standing, he tucks his face into her side. "Thanks for showing me." He hesitates, swallows. _"Abuelo."_

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her father's stubborn features soften.

Kate wraps an arm around her son, holding his head to her ribcage. 

“But I don’t think--” Jasón looks up at them, emboldened. His eyes touch a tenderness she didn’t even know lay within her before him. “I don’t want to fish anymore.”

 

“Torn up about the fishing trip being cut short?” Kate clinks her bottle of sparkling soda against her father’s beer bottle and sits beside him on the log. Her hiking boots dig into the loam.

She doesn’t apologize. Jasón made a principled choice. She respects that. And this trip was for him.

Contemplatively, Dad sips his beer. “What do you think about macrame as a hobby?”

Kate’s lips lift. “I’ve never thought about macrame in my life, and I won’t start now.” She draws a flower in the condensation on her bottle.

They both watch the silhouettes of her wife and son in the tent, still lit up so Jasón and Renee can read _James and the Giant Peach_ together (he'd wanted to bring six books, they whittled it down to one) and switch off on the voices.

“Quite a son you have there.” 

She’ll take it as a compliment. “Quite a grandson you have,” she returns.

“Stop aging me,” he complains. Reaching over, he gives her fingers a quick squeeze. She forgets how lined his hands are. It’s easy to forget. “Speaking of grandkids...what’s the timeline for giving Jasón some siblings to terrorize?”

Kate groans. “Dad!” It's not like he was wholly welcoming to her son from the start. Maybe because he was still holding out hope for another Jewish redhead in the Kane line. She also suspects it might have something to do with classism, though he's insisted for decades that the military is the great equalizer.

Thankfully, he doesn’t press, just laughs and lapses into the quiet so much bigger and broader than the city’s quiet, so they can listen to the night noises together.

When he breaks the silence, it’s thoughtfully. “If there’s anything I ever teach you, Kate, it’s that I could always use some teaching myself.”

Fireflies flit in front of them, but they can’t flicker brighter than this thing in Kate’s chest. “He learned you real good, huh, Dad?”

Dad shakes his head. “Never let me get so old that I can’t learn something about mercy from a boy.”

**Author's Note:**

> that hat really exists and can be viewed [here.](http://i3.cpcache.com/product/301862524/wife_lets_me_go_fishing_baseball_baseball_cap.jpg?width=225&height=225&Filters=%5B%7B%22name%22%3A%22background%22%2C%22value%22%3A%22F2F2F2%22%2C%22sequence%22%3A2%7D%5D)
> 
> the song that plays on the radio is ["santeria"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEYN5w4T_aM) by sublime.


End file.
